Osmans Rejoice As Their Boy, Freed of Treason, Sails Home

May 23, 1934

Joseph and Rebecca Osman of 995 Clarkson street, Brooklyn, parents of Corporal Robert Osman, rejoiced yesterday at news of their son’s acquittal on the charge of having attempted to send important military information to Communists in New York.

For months they had spent days and nights of worry while the long drawn-out case had dragged on.

ROOSEVELT TAKES UP CUDGEL

A trial last year before an army court martial resulted in Osman’s being found guilty, and he was sentenced to twenty years’ imprisonment. This sentence was reversed by order of President Roosevelt.

A New York Jewish newspaper crusaded for aid for the twenty-four-year-old Brooklyn Jewish soldier, and finally Louis Waldman, an attorney of 302 Broadway, went down to the Canal Zone to defend him at the second trial.

Osman was acquitted at the conclusion of this trial Monday.

Mr. Osman took a day off from the shoe factory at which he works and spent it with his wife and their four other children: Albert, 22, a civilian employe in the War Department here; Frances, 20, a bookkeeper; Edward, 18, just graduated from Brooklyn Technical High School, and Martin, 9, a high ranking pupil in elementary school.

The trial of Corporal Osman involved a thinly veiled feeling of anti-Semitism in Army circles in the Canal Zone. Only once did this prejudice show itself-when the preliminary investigator, a Colonel Buchanan, hinted that Osman’s “birth” should be taken into consideration at the trial.

The entire evidence on which prosecuting officers attempted to have Osman convicted consisted of the fact that the name of a girl Osman once knew was found in a letter containing a plan of Canal Zone fortifications in the dead letter office at Cristobal. A number of other “suspicious” facts about the youth’s life were taken up, and each was rationally explained by Waldman, according to a statement to the Jewish Daily Bulletin by David Asche, Mr. Waldman’s associate.

Corporal Osman, vindicated, sailed for New York on the transport Chateau Thierry and will arrive here next week.